Agatha Christie is not one to make life easy for her detectives, or for her readers, and this particular Poirot murder mystery is one of her most brilliantly plotted. The characterization, too, is richly enjoyable, for Mrs Christie seems as much at home with these peers, actresses, and Jewish financiers as with the villagers of St Mary Mead.
The anti-semitism is still to be found, not so much in the portrait of Sir Montagu Corner, who does no worse than show off his knowledge of ‘Japanese prints, of Chinese lacquer, of Persian carpets, of the French impressionists, of modern music and of the theories of Einstein’ before allowing Poirot to get a word in, but in a young and impoverished aristocrat’s comments on the wealthy Rachel Dortheimer, with whom he flirts in a box at the opera, but of whom he later comments that ‘her long Jewish nose is quivering with emotion’. This is by no means the last Christie novel which will be disfigured by what Jacques Barzun16 has called ‘the usual tedious British anti-Semitism’, which will continue to surface in her pages until the war years, though less frequently than heretofore.
Hastings is at Poirot’s side throughout this adventure. Why he is not at home with his wife in the Argentine is not explained: he is recalled home at the end of the story. Incidentally, it is in this novel that we discover Hastings to have a small ‘tooth-brush’ moustache, for Poirot contrasts it scornfully with his own ludicrously luxuriant waxed creation. We discover, too, that young men, if they are too good-looking (‘It isn’t natural for a man to have good looks like that’) are likely to have very dubious morals. ‘Not the usual thing. Something a great deal more recherché and nasty,’ says Inspector Japp of a suspect’s sex-life, though probably all he means is ‘Not girls but boys’.
Poirot’s investigation is interrupted by his being called away to solve the case of ‘The Ambassador’s Boots’. This is an example of Mrs Christie’s occasional absent-mindedness, for the case in question was solved not by Poirot but by Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. ‘The Ambassador’s Boots’ is an episode in Partners in Crime.
In 1934, Lord Edgware Dies was filmed by Read Art Films, with Austin Trevor playing Poirot for the third and last time, Richard Cooper as Hastings and Melville Cooper as Inspector Japp, roles they had played in the film of Black Coffee. Jane Wilkinson was played by Jane Carr, and the film was produced by Julius Hagen and directed by Henry Edwards. Though well acted, it did only moderately well at the box office, and was dismissed by one unsympathetic reviewer as ‘just another conventional mystery play’.
As Thirteen at Dinner, a TV movie version was produced by Warner Brothers in 1985, with Peter Ustinov as Poirot.
About Charles Osborne
This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne’s The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie (1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among them The Complete Operas of Verdi (1969); Wagner and His World (1977); and W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world’s leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne adapted the Christie plays Black Coffee (Poirot); Spider’s Web; and The Unexpected Guest into novels. He lives in London.
About Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Mrs Christie is the author of eighty crime novels and short story collections, nineteen plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.
Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was written towards the end of World War I (during which she served in the Voluntary Aid Detachments). In it she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian investigator who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. After having been rejected by a number of houses, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was eventually published by The Bodley Head in 1920.